Pinterest Announces Promoted Pins

Back in September 2013 Pinterest made an announcement that they were starting to experiment with advertisements on the social media platform in the form of “Promoted Pins”.

They recently said that they’re starting to test the new advertising format with a small group of leading brands who are going to be the first to try promoted pins advertising. According to Pinterest these Promoted Pins will only appear on the search and category feeds.

These brands include:

ABC Family

Banana Republic

Expedia.com

Gap

General Mills

Kraft

Lululemon Athletica

Nestle – Purina, Dreyer’s/Edy’s Ice Cream, Nespresso

Old Navy

Target

Walt Disney Parks and Resorts

Ziploc

Pinterest have kept the test group small so they can collect feedback prior to launching the paid advertisements to more businesses throughout the year. They’re hoping to test that the Promoted Pins are tasteful, transparent and relevant and improved based on your feedback.

They want to make sure they can advertise in a way that won’t upset the Pinterest users, which is why they’re not putting ads on the users main feed. These new Promoted Pins look like any other Pin on Pinterest except there’s a small text label on it indicating that they’re an ad, however at first glance it would be difficult to spot the difference.

So what does this change mean for small/medium businesses? Well according to AdAge Pinterest is looking for a pretty sizeable commitment from its advertisers, roughly looking at between $1 million – $2 million per campaign, pricing CPMs – Cost Per Thousand Impressions – between $30 and $40. So for now, you could say that these ads are not yet suitable for smaller businesses.

The launch of these new Promotional Pins has shown that Pinterest has hit a major milestone in social advertising as they join the two social giants such as Facebook and Twitter.